My Great-Grandmother Sofia Showed Me the Courage It Takes to Start Over in a New Country

From the moment my great-grandmother Sofia Bazarnicki was born, her family knew she was something special.

As my Ukrainian grandfather told the story, his mother Sofia started talking at age one and then learned five languages. She had a phenomenal memory.

The problem was she lived in Austria (now Ukraine) and her family was poor. This is a time period when girls were not educated and never had a chance to have a career. After all, this was back in the 1880s. Because of large gaps in generations on my grandfather’s side, my grandfather was born in 1908 and his mother was born in 1879.

Sofia’s family emigrated to the Netherlands, where a kindly neighbor became her tutor, Mrs. C. She was widowed and had never had her own child, so she took Sofia under her wing.

From reading the great works of Shakespeare, and Dickens, and studying science books about astronomy and physics, Sofia was proving to be a genius. A literal genius.

Her parents were poor immigrants and their hope for her, to have a better life, was for her to marry rich. She did not want to. As she neared her 18th birthday, back then, she was expected to marry.